In the News (Thu 14 Dec 17)

John (Richard) Boyd (USAF) (January 23, 1927–March 9, 1997) was a fighter pilot and militarystrategist of the late 20th century whose theories have been highly influential in the military and in business.

Boyd was called to Washington, D.C. in the weeks preceding the war, to develop the plan under the supervision of the then Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney, Current Vice-President of the United States.

JohnBoyd was an architect of that victory as surely as if he'd commanded a fighter wing or a maneuver division in the desert." Boyd's key concept was that of the decision cycle or OODA Loop, the process by which an entity (either an individual or an organization) reacts to an event.

JohnBoyd originally developed this diagram to explain to new fighter pilots how to direct their own energies to defeat their enemies and find survival for themselves.

Boyd emphasised that "the loop" is actually a set of interacting loops that are to be kept in continuous operation during combat.

One of JohnBoyd's primary insights in fighter combat was that it was more important to be able to change speed, direction, and altitude more rapidly than one's opponent than it was to simply be able to fly faster than one's opponent.

John (Richard) Boyd (USAF) (January 23, 1927 - March 9, 1997) was a fighter pilot and militarystrategist of the late 20th century whose theories have been highly influential in the military and in business.

Boyd was called to Washington, D.C. in the weeks preceding the war, to develop the plan under the supervision of the then Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney.

Boyd's key concept was that of the decision cycle or OODA Loop, the process by which an organization reacts to an event.

www.biographybase.com /biography/Boyd_John.html (304 words)

The Man to Thank: John Boyd and the OODA Loop in Iraq(Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-20)

"JohnBoyd is one of the principal military geniuses of the 20th century, and hardly anyone knows his name," said John Thompson, a former Canadian army officer who is managing director of the MacKenzie Institute, a Toronto-based think tank which studies global conflict.

Boyd's biographer, Robert Coram, says, "Simply rendered, the OODA loop is a blueprint for the manoeuvre tactics that allow one to attack the mind of an opponent, to unravel its commander even before a battle begins." (Robert Coram, Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War, Little Brown and Company: 2002.

JohnBoyd asserts that one can paralyze an enemy by operating inside the opponent's OODA loop, meaning that the individual is operating a faster cycle speed than the enemy's.

Like Boyd before him, Spinney is a professional irritant at the Pentagon, disliked by many military leaders but secure in his position, thanks to his unique talent and his many political connections.

Schwerpunkt, Boyd wrote, "represents a unifying medium that provides a directed way to tie initiative of many subordinate actions with superior intent as a basis to diminish friction and compress time." That is, employees decide and act locally, but they are guided by a keen understanding of the bigger picture.

John R. Boyd died, says Robert Coram, "believing that people considered him a kook, a man who never made general and whose ideas never gained popular acceptance." His ideas weren't easy to grasp, and most military leaders were loathe to listen to such a source of disruption -- an iconoclast who threatened their comfortable order.

Its military object is "to break the spirit and will of the enemy command by creating surprising and dangerous operational or strategic situations." To achieve this end, one must operate at a faster tempo or rhythm than one's adversaries.

Boyd asserts that success in future war, as in all past war, will be the result of genius in the face of menacing uncertainty.

Whereas Boyd speaks of operating at a faster tempo or rhythm than one's opponent, Warden describes the strategic and operational advantages inherent in high-technology "hyperwar." Whereas Boyd talks of creating a highly fluid and menacing environment to which the enemy cannot adapt, Warden advocates parallel attack against the enemy's key operational and strategic nodes.

www.fas.org /man/eprint/fadok.htm (17154 words)

Amazon.com: Books: Boyd : The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War(Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-20)

Boyd dedicated his later years to a radical theory of conflict that was largely ignored during Boyd's lifetime, but that is now widely considered to be the most influential thinking about conflict since Sun Tzu's The Art of War.

JohnBoyd was apparently an arrogant, stubborn, and brilliant man. I'm not sure I would want to work for him or with him, and I certainly would not want to be one of his children, but America needs more like him.

JohnBoyd was not a perfect man, but he did have integrity and clarity of thought, as well as VMGO - Vision, Mission, Goals, and Objectives.

Boyd was a brilliant and blazingly eccentric man. He was a crackerjack jet fighter pilot, a visionary scholar, and an innovative militarystrategist.

Among other things, Boyd wrote the first manual on jet aerial combat, was primarily responsible for designing the F-15 and the F-16 jet fighters, was a leading voice in the post-Vietnam-War military reform movement, and shaped the smashingly successful U.S. military strategy in the Persian Gulf War.

Boyd also was a brash, combative, iconoclastic man who made enemies (and fiercely loyal acolytes) everywhere he went.

Sun Tzu and Boyd suggested that military force is not the only, or necessarily the best, means of achieving national goals.

U.S. military thinking and planning is largely stuck in second-generation, industrial age warfare of bloody and destructive attrition, based in part on the works of 19th Century strategist Carl von Clausewitz.

Broken leadership and fraying cohesion in the military needs to be fixed, in part by ending constant personnel rotation among units, halting the system of automatic and premature discharge of officers, and training and empowering officers to exercise more initiative.

www.cdi.org /mrp/backgrounder052501.html (465 words)

Amazon.com: Books: Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War(Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-20)

Boyd also was a brash, combative, iconoclastic man, not above insulting his superiors at the Pentagon (both military and civilian); he made enemies (and fiercely loyal acolytes) everywhere he went.

A Boyd advocate (he "contributed as much to fighter aviation as any man in the history of the Air Force," Coram notes), Coram does not shy away from Boyd's often self-defeating abrasiveness and the neglect and mistreatment of his long-suffering wife and children, and keeps the story of a unique life moving smoothly and engagingly.

On a personal level, the author treats Boyd's family life, and his neglect of his family, in objective but considerate terms; the author is also quite effective in identifying and addressing those instances in Boyd's professional life when his fighter-pilot embellishments might be construed by lesser mortals to be falsehoods.

Boyd's ideas were unpopular with most generals, even after his death in 1997.

Nevertheless, from a strictly military point of view, it is hard to argue with a three-week drive that brought down a regime and caused a sizable military machine to collapse.

The debate between the overwhelming-force and speedy-action schools of military strategy is sure to continue, although the Rumsfeld rapid-maneuver side of the argument is sure to be ascendant for some time.

Boyd, a lanky cigar-chewing iconoclast who died in 1997, would have described this campaign in terms of aerial maneuvering: When there's a bandit on your tail, you have to turn tighter and faster -- and more unpredictably -- in order to get him in your sights from behind.

Dubbed "Genghis John" for his uncompromising zeal, Boyd condensed his theories into a series of detailed briefings which drew on physics, logic, cultural anthropology and ethics, and he buttonholed anyone who would listen -- scientists, generals, reporters, academics and politicians, including a young congressman named Dick Cheney.

Another unconventional idea is to use what military officers call "effects-based operations." For instance, if a goal is to erode bin Laden's base of support, a massive effort to feed, house and support Afghan refugees would work better than attacking suspected camps with cruise missiles -- even if launching missiles is easier and quicker.

Boyd demonstrated that Sun Tzu is as relevant to the modern age as to the Warring States Period.

Boyd's alternative was to attack the enemy's mind in the manner of Sun Tzu, except that Boyd also had the advantages of insights from complexity theory, quantum mechanics, foundations of mathematics, evolutionary biology, neurophysiology, thermodynamics, and so on to draw from.

Military force can be a political instrument, but, as Sun Tzu notes, in war, victory is determined by the opponent.

His ideas about “maneuverability” as the sine qua non of military effectiveness, long on the back burner (during the Cold War standoff between sluggish behemoths), have marched front and center in the new age of instability, ambiguity, and terrorism.

United Press International - International(p) - The Mystery of the Missing WMDs(Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-20)

Newstrack: Forensic experts at a military base in Hawaii will examine the remains of a U.S. airman killed 60 years ago when his parachute failed to open.

What the late, great militarystrategistJohnBoyd said of the Pentagon is now universal: "It is not true they have no strategy.

That law says that when it comes to military intelligence, whatever you think you know is incomplete, and some of it is wrong.

www.upi.com /view.cfm?StoryID=20030703-044650-6144r (1132 words)

Military Theory of War, Warfare Theory, Principles of War, Military Strategy, Theories, Theorists(Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-20)

Brilliant military leader and domestic reformer; rebelled against military discipline as a youth and was court-martialed; in the Seven Years' War of 1756-1763, he held off the armies of Russia, France, and Austria (all larger powers) through adroit maneuvering, timing, and skill.

An overriding influence in their military education was the teachings of Dennis Hart Mahan, who taught for many years at West Point." -- training of the military leaders at Gettysburg "was dominated by the actions of Napoleon, the writings of Jomini, and formulated by the teachings of Mahan.

As strategists and operational artists, we must rid ourselves of the idea that the central feature of war is the clash of military forces.

I received the attached message from a woman with long experience in the defense industry, a close observer of military reform, and a student of the late militarystrategist and theoretician, JohnBoyd (Col. USAF Ret).

As I have said in many early messages, I believe the most significant issue affecting personnel readiness and morale is related to a growing wedge of mistrust between the junior officers and enlisted ranks on the one hand and the senior officers on the other.

Even if we assume that the "join the military so you can have a great career" craze has bred a different type of warrior, by which I mean one less dedicated to BEING a warrior than my own peer group (now retired out), I still can't buy that they wouldn't want the opportunity to fly.

Also consider the challenge presented to all the military departments by Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld when he called for leaders who were proactive, more like venture capitalists, and deal with uncertainty—those unknown, unknowns.

MilitarystrategistJohnBoyd considered “rapidity” one of his four parts of strategic thinking.

StrategistBoyd would consider this kind of thinking as “variety” and “harmony” in that effective organizations invite rather than fear different points of view.

Cheney implies that John Kerry couldn't protect us from an attack like 9/11, blithely ignoring the fact that he and President Bush didn't protect us from the real 9/11.

And serving in the National Guard is serving in the military.

And though the chain of command for military actions runs from the president to the secretary of defense, Bush didn't call Rumsfeld for nearly an hour after the second tower was hit, though more than a half-hour lapsed between the crash into the second tower in New York and the attack on the Pentagon.

www.atrios.blogspot.com /2004_09_05_atrios_archive.html (7353 words)

Linda Beckerman's Bio(Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-20)

As she salvaged each program, she was handed yet another, since the defense industry has no shortage of badly managed programs.

During this time, she became a student of the late Col. JohnBoyd (USAF, Ret'd), who is considered by many to be the greatest militarystrategist the United States military ever produced.

From him she learned "not to let the system own" her and that what really matters is to "survive on your own terms".

Students of Boyd refer to this process as 'getting inside your opponent's loop.' The best way to prevent terrorists from doing this seems to be for the intended target to change its loop faster than the terrorist can respond.

Boyd, if you haven't heard of him, was a highly unorthodox militarystrategist whose brilliance has only been appreciated since his death.

Instead, it seems to me that the Israeli approach of a series of behavioral interviews, done without predictability, as one wends his way through the airport might be more likely to trip up the potential terrorist.

www.stephensonstrategies.com /2004/10/18.html (770 words)

The Strategy of the Fighter Pilot(Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-20)

John R. Boyd, USAF (ret.) died in West Palm Beach Florida on Sunday, 9 March 1997.

Insight on the News: How Col. JohnBoyd beat the generals; he was first to codify air-to-air combat techniques, and his ideas now have become standard operating procedure for air forces and ground combat worldwide - Nation: heroism

Breaking your competitors' response cycles and anticipating their next moves will lead to marketplace victory.

The concept of the OODA loop (observe, orient, decide, act) was invented by militarystrategist Colonel JohnBoyd to explain why some pilots are faster and better at winning aerial dogfights than others.

Applying the OODA loop to your business can take your competitive response to a new level.

"War-Winning Weapons: The Measurement of Technological Determinism in Military History," by George Raudzens J Military History v 54 (Oct 1990) pp.

Nicolay and Hay on Tennessee and Kentucky, 1861 (1888)

"Abraham Lincoln, John Pope, and the Origins of Total War," by Daniel E. Sutherland J Military History v 56 (Oct 1992) pp.

tigger.uic.edu /~rjensen/military.html (6077 words)

The CEO Refresher - High Performance Thinking(Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-20)

JohnBoyd, a militarystrategist whose ideas are being rapidly adopted by today's cutting edge businesses, identified four critical components of strategic thinking that are helpful in this conversation.

Once a week, everyone's direct reports should turn in a one-page (or if using computers, a one-screen), standard length document.

A good referent for the average company is the U.S. military's after action review process.